Deposit sweep systems transfer funds between trading accounts, such as brokerage accounts, and interest bearing deposit accounts, such as bank or other depository accounts and other cash management vehicles. Such systems are implemented using computers specifically programmed to carry out deposit sweep operations, including transfer and allocation operations.
A shortcoming of existing deposit sweep systems is that they require cooperation, on a technological level, from the partner source institutions. Such cooperation can entail ensuring compatibility of the computer systems used to perform deposit sweep transactions, ensuring existence of technological access to source and/or destination computer systems, and ensuring compliance with any restrictions or conditions imposed by the source and destination institutions. Deposit sweep programs thus may require as a preliminary step establishment of technological connections among particular source institutions, destination institutions, and a deposit sweep management computer system. Deposit sweep program offerings may thus be limited to customers of particular partner source and destination institutions, such as brokerage institutions and/or depository institutions, or otherwise may require prospective deposit sweep program customers to establish accounts at such partner institutions. Heretofore, there has been a technological barrier to customers participating in deposit sweep systems without the cooperation and participation of the source institutions from which the funds to be swept are otherwise maintained. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a technical solution that bypasses such need for cooperation and provides greater flexibility to execute deposit sweep transactions with any available source or destination institution.
A second shortcoming of existing deposit sweep systems is the lack of technological mechanisms by which customers can exert control over the computer-implemented deposit sweep transactions to control which banks are used to store the customer's funds. Interaction between a deposit sweep system and an account holder from a separate source institution proves to be difficult among existing deposit sweep systems, and a technological manner in which to obtain such direct interaction, and thus user control, is desirable. Often, if a user knew of which particular depository institution his or her funds are being held at, or are to be held at, at any given moment, a user may object to the use of particular depository institutions for a number of reasons, including lack of insurance, difficulty of access to funds, or personal preference, to name a few reasons. Prior art deposit sweep systems lack technological mechanisms by which users can be informed in real time or even contemporaneously of the institutions at which their funds will be deposited and by which users can exert control over the institutions that are used. Often users must wait for a monthly statement to arrive. Technological improvements over such prior art deposit sweep systems are desired to inject customer control and/or timely notification into automated computer-implemented deposit sweep processes.
A third shortcoming of existing deposit sweep systems is security. Data hacks and phishing scams pose a persistent threat, particularly to data stored on computer systems or verification of user authentication information. Prior art security systems require storage of one or more reference credentials for a user, including biometric information, passwords, pin numbers, and/or fingerprint data, to which user access credentials are compared to authenticate them. The stored reference credentials are subject to data leaks and data breaches. While stored secret information, such as passwords, may be changed if compromised, biometric information cannot be changed as the various biometric signatures of a particular individual are generally unique and non-varying. Moreover, some users are reluctant to store their biometric information either in a device or at a cloud storage system (e.g., at a server), where the user cannot guarantee that others will not be able to access that personal biometric data. In addition to matching with reference credentials, other prior art security systems use public key cryptography that enables a user to provide a digital signature using a private key, which signature is verifiable using a corresponding public key. However, such systems require storage or memorization of the private key, which can be expressed as a large alphanumeric sequence. Memorization can be difficult, and again, stored keys may be leaked or hacked. Therefore it is desirable to provide a security system that does not store secret user credentials but that also does not require a user to input or provide a long private key or store sensitive biometric information which may be subject to a potential data breach.